1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile terminal. More particularly, the present invention relates to a mobile terminal for displaying a menu according to a function supported by another party's terminal or a terminal status set by the other party.
2. Description of the Related Art
With advances in mobile communication technology, wireless communication systems are able to provide various types of services that are capable of transmitting multimedia data at high transmission speed. For example, wireless communication systems are able to transmit such items as e-mail, photos, videos and music at high speed.
Commensurate with the development of the mobile communication services, mobile terminal manufacturers are producing terminals that are capable of supporting the various multimedia services. However, new functions may be only supported by models that are produced after the technical development. Accordingly, previously produced models may not support the new functions.
A new model terminal may support a larger number of functions than an old model terminal. Accordingly, when a user purchases a new model terminal and uses a new function supported by the new model, an older model terminal, being used by another party that is communicating with the user, may not support the selected function. In practice, however, it is difficult for the user to know all functions supported by the terminal of the other party. An example of this problem will be described below.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating an example of a conventional Multimedia Message Service (MMS) transmission.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, a transmitting terminal 10 is a new model terminal capable of supporting an MMS function and a receiving terminal 18 is an old model terminal incapable of supporting the MMS function.
When a user of the transmitting terminal 10, after selecting ‘Compose MMS’ from a menu list, composes and transmits an MMS message to which an image is attached, the composed MMS message is provided to the receiving terminal 18 through a base station 12 at a transmitting side, a communication network 14, and a base station 16 at a receiving side in a normal procedure.
However, since the receiving terminal 18 does not support the MMS function, the MMS message from the transmitting terminal 10 may not be provided to the receiving terminal 18, the attached image may not be displayed on a screen of the receiving terminal 18, or damaged content of the MMS message may be displayed on the screen of the receiving terminal 18.
Even when a message indicating that the MMS message transmission has failed is displayed on the screen of the transmitting terminal 10 to address the above problem, further annoyances, such as the trouble taken to create the MMS message, the service fee to transmit the MMS message, or the trouble taken to re-create and re-transmit the MMS message according to an MMS message transmission failure may be additionally imposed.
This problem creates even greater user inconvenience and annoyance when an MMS message having a large volume of data, such as multimedia content or e-mail that is time-consuming to create and transmit, fails to be properly transmitted since a corresponding function is not supported by a terminal of the other party.
Another problem in the conventional system is that the other user may not be aware of the status of the terminal user. For example, since the other party may not be aware of a situation in which it is difficult for the terminal user to perform voice communication because, for example, the user is in a meeting or is asleep, there is no method for preventing an incoming call from the other party. In the conventional technology, the user may notify the other party that a conversation by phone is impossible by pressing an automatic answering button when an incoming call is received from the other party. When desiring to request the other party to send a text message since the conversation by phone is impossible while in a meeting, the user bears the additional burden of recording an automatic answering message indicating a situation such as the above every time.